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U.S. Helps Russia Turn Germ Center to Peace Uses

On a bitterly cold afternoon last fall, a handful of Russian scientists gathered at a deserted cemetery in Siberia for an impromptu ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of what was once the Soviet Union's largest laboratory for developing viral weapons.

Lev S. Sandakhchiev, the director of the lab, known as Vector, situated in the town of Koltsovo, raised a plastic cup of vodka to the memory of Nikolai Ustinov, a scientist who died in the spring of 1988 after accidentally infecting himself with the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic killer that he and his colleagues were trying to perfect as a weapon.

Standing beside Dr. Ustinov's widow, Yevgenia, at the foot of her husband's still-contaminated grave, Dr. Sandakhchiev toasted their fallen colleague and friend, who documented the progress of the disease as it ravaged him, in a diary stained with his blood. ''Thank God it is over,'' Dr. Sandakhchiev said, as tears streamed down his face.

In nearly a decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, Dr. Sandakhchiev, quietly aided by the United States, says he has been steering Vector, or the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, away from its past and toward peaceful research. Rather than using germs to kill people, he says, Vector -- which was a secret place that did not appear on maps -- is now trying to save people, and itself in the process.

Some American intelligence analysts and Congressional staff members remain wary of Vector's research and fearful that Russia may still be conducting secret germ warfare work at closed military sites and institutes. But administration officials and scientists who have toured the lab -- once the crown jewel of the Soviet germ warfare empire -- say the administration's investment to transform Vector seems to be paying off.

The World Health Organization has endorsed a proposal backed by President Clinton to conduct research into smallpox vaccines and anti-viral drugs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and at Vector, a decision that helped cement Vector's status as a legitimate player in global science.

Given such developments, American officials and germ warfare experts say, Vector has quietly been removed from the administration's ''threat'' list.

''Mention of Vector used to send shivers down the spines of intelligence analysts,'' said Amy E. Smithson, a germ and chemical warfare specialist at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, and the author of a new study of the administration's programs to reduce the threat of the former Soviet Union's germ warfare institutes.

''Now, with all of Sandakhchiev's changes and the frequent visitor traffic in and out of there, Vector hardly rates as a concern,'' she said.

Indeed, once part of a closed Soviet city, Vector has increasingly welcomed foreign scientists. In September, the center played host to more than 50 American and foreign scientists at a conference financed in part by the United States. It also gave a reporter an unprecedented tour of laboratories where the most sensitive germ research was once conducted and allowed Vector's scientists to discuss their previous smallpox research and other experiments.

Scientists and officials say Vector scientists are joining forces with American and European scientists in various commercial and nonprofit ventures: making diagnostic kits for markets in the former Soviet Union, enriched milk for children, interferon and antibodies, even cosmetics.

In one project, Vector scientists and two American biotech companies are developing a new anti-viral drug that they hope will help neutralize Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers, thus reducing the threat of bioterrorism, or will replace other drugs to which bacteria and viruses have grown increasingly resistant.

This kind of transformation has been neither smooth nor easy. Enmeshed in Soviet-style secrecy and nationalism, hard-liners in Russia have resisted scientific exchanges and Vector's growing ties to the West, American officials and Russian scientists say.

In Washington, skeptics in Congress and national security circles also initially opposed the administration's attempts to finance the center's transformation, warning that Russia might use American aid to continue offensive germ research at other, still-closed labs.

But several key critics of the program were surprised when the administration quietly informed Congress last year that Vector had rebuffed offers from Iran to buy products, technology and scientific expertise. Detailed audits of Vector's grants show that the millions of dollars invested by Washington -- which now account for about half of Vector's annual budget -- have been spent as Congress intended.

As a result, Congress substantially increased the Pentagon's request to finance programs to open Russia's germ labs, bringing the total to $14 million. And the State Department could provide much more financing for its biological programs.

Daily life at the isolated installation remains difficult, however. Vector, deprived of most Russian government funds, now struggles to get by with about 2,200 scientists and technicians -- less than half the number working at the lab during its heyday.

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According to Ken Alibek, a defector who was a top official in Moscow's germ warfare program, smallpox had long been the Soviet Union's biological weapon of choice. ''Moscow,'' he wrote in ''BioHazard,'' published last year by Random House, ''had stored up to 20 tons of the virus at other facilities to ensure that Moscow would never be caught short.'' The stocks have been destroyed, Dr. Alibek and Moscow say.

Even as his country promised to end its germ weapons program, the last Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, financed the construction of dozens of installations at Vector for the smallpox weapon project in the 1980's, soon after the World Health Organization had declared the ancient scourge eradicated.

Today, many of those installations are empty, unfinished or deteriorating. A giant viral reactor built then has been dismantled, and Vector has lacked money even to buy monkeys for tests since 1991.

''Given what was planned for this facility, we were lucky that Communism ended when it did,'' said an administration official who follows biological issues closely.

A key part of the administration's conversion strategy has involved the World Health Organization, some of whose scientists have been suspicious of Vector ever since they learned that the lab once carried out secret germ research in violation of a 1972 treaty banning germ weapons, which the Soviet Union had signed.

In 1994, Russia quietly moved to Vector its collection of smallpox strains from the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow, although the W.H.O. had designated Ivanovsky as the only storage site in Russia.

The W.H.O. quickly visited Vector and designated it as the official site, but the move raised suspicions. Dr. Sandakhchiev asserted in an interview that the strains had been moved merely because Russia faced a terrorist threat from war in Chechnya and Vector provided a more secure site for Russia's 120 smallpox isolates -- the world's largest collection, twice the size of America's.

Concern about smallpox intensified this year after Dr. Alibek and others warned that strains of the deadly virus had found their way to Iraq, North Korea and other countries and that therefore the supposedly eradicated disease still posed a threat to a now unvaccinated world.

Based on such reports, Mr. Clinton reversed his earlier support for the W.H.O.'s decision to destroy the virus at the two declared storage sites in Atlanta and at Vector. In Geneva in May, Washington led a successful campaign within the W.H.O. to defer destroying the virus and to endorse research on the disease.

In an interview, Dr. Sergei N. Shchelkunov, a smallpox expert at Vector, said more work was needed to understand the virulence and peculiarities of all the strains, which should help develop new vaccines.

In the spring of 1991, Dr. Alexander Guskev, a Vector scientist, led a team more than 2,400 miles across Siberia to the tiny town of Chersky, north of the Arctic Circle.

There the scientists unearthed in the deep permafrost the still-frozen bodies of people wrapped in deerskin shrouds and buried in pits who were thought to have died of smallpox nearly 145 years ago.

Dr. Guskev insisted that his goal was not to find more smallpox strains. The mission's goal, he insisted, showing visitors videos of the expedition, was to disinfect the cemetery of what might be a dangerous living virus.

Initial biopsies of bone and skin fragments from the bodies found no trace of the virus, he said. But the team returned the following July and August and hit scientific pay-dirt -- frozen bodies so well preserved that their pockmarks were still visible. ''But when we returned to Vector, we found that we couldn't isolate or revive the virus-like particles,'' Dr. Guskev said.

He hopes to return to another permafrost area next summer, although he now lacks funds. ''Such research is a luxury that Vector cannot afford and whose medical application is debatable,'' an American military scientist said. ''Until the past is truly dead and buried, I doubt that anyone will fund it.''

Dr. Sandakhchiev, whom even Dr. Alibek praised for his ''determination to protect his employees,'' seems eager to bury the past. ''All labs like ours have a responsibility to be open and to share information,'' he said. ''To fight disease and inspire mutual trust, we must communicate with each other. That is our future. There is no alternative.''